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Top level seems sparse this week, I posted this just before Trump's verdict was dropping and I thought it might be at least a little entertaining, so I would like to proffer it again as an unsung culture war issue, BOATS!
Boating/Fishing and Right Wing Associations.
Inspired by a post in Wellness Wednesday, it took on a bit of a culture war tone as I wrote my response.
To the best of my recollection this is kind of a thing that started really turning ugly during covid. The notion guys with fish in their profile picks were all right wing anti-vaxxers because an odd amount of the posts on the hermaincainaward subreddit had a dude with a fish held high in their profile...
I've seen that "trend" other places where people have kind of sussed out a correlation of fish pictures and right wing proclivities, I just did a quick search on the tinder subreddit and others, I've found the question going back at least 6 years.. There are dozens more posts like this every year asking "Why all the fish pics" or "Stop with the fish pics".
There were also those boat parades for Trump etc...recreational power boating and ocean fishing are generally very white, sometimes wealthy. Fly fishing is even whiter and wealthier, think float plane trips to remote Alaskan camps and guided week long floats down untouched rivers. Bass fishing is white redneck hick Trump central and that is what a lot of people think of because of the televised tournaments and occasional news articles, add in a little cruelty to animals and you've got a stew going.
Some on the more extreme left, and probably a lot of young women of dating age must figure if you're fishing from shore or bass fishing you're a white trash trumper. They figure if you're fishing from a boat or racing to a sandbar to party that you're middle class to small business owner, killing animals for fun and burning gas while polluting the world, and if you're fly fishing in Kamchatka or deep sea fishing from a GT70 then you're a fat cat that needs to be eaten when the revolution comes (but maybe that won't be for a while so let's see where this goes).
https://old.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/comments/quo8p7/grandpa_catches_a_big_fish_and_a_big_virus/ https://old.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/comments/rb2tzq/update_guy_thought_he_was_a_legend_for_not_taking/ https://old.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/nyoc9z/why_do_they_all_have_boats/ https://old.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/168ivpu/when_men_hold_up_fish_in_their_dating_profile/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/u5eaiy/whats_wrong_with_fish_pictures_i_see_so_many/
I'm going to quote my own comment on anti-Conservative dating discrimination
Let's apply this simple system to Fish Pictures. Let's start by positing that Tweets have been tweeted around left wing feminine twitter and articles written on left wing feminine-coded websites about how fish pictures are unattractive. This is definitely true, Fish Picture discourse exists, as you provide examples of. As soon as that is the case, the phenomenon is self sustaining. If you're using a Fish Picture, you are perceived as either out of touch with the social discourse, or so incredibly obsessed with right wing politics, I mean fish, that you it's the only picture you have. Neither is attractive in a mate. Even if an individual woman doesn't mind fishing in and of itself, she may still discriminate against Fish Pictures because she things it signals a guy who is either socially inept or fish obsessed, because she knows other girls discriminate against Fish Pictures.
It's a good way to select for guys who read the same twitter feeds and thinkpieces you do, where they would have learned that Fish Pictures are bad and maybe racist or something.
You might be right that that's how it works now. But I want to imagine that the Fish Picture debate started for simpler, more innocent reasons- just a fundamental disconnect between how Men and Women present themselves and see the world.
The men aren't choosing the fish pictures because it's the only picture they have. OK, maybe some are- men usually don't take nearly as many pictures as women, and they don't pose for pics with a friend holding the camera taking multiple shots to take the perfect selfie like women do. But still, they do have other pics. They choose the fish pic because they think it's a good picture!
They think "I should show a picture that shows off my hobbies. I'm outdoors, doing something healthy and vaguely athletic. Here's me in my crowning moment of triumph, having just caught a fish! I have a genuine, happy smile. And it's in a boat, so I can subtly show off that I have at least a little bit of money to afford some recreational equipment."
And women see that and it just BOMBS. They don't see any of the stuff that the men are trying to communicate. They think "What is this gross cold slimey thing? Does he enjoy torturing animals for fun? This picture is at a terrible angle, it's focused on his nostrils. And he's sunburned- obviously not a guy who takes care of his skin. That boat looks gross, too. Why doesn't he have any normal hobbies, like shopping or baking fancy cakes?"
I'm really confused by your summary. What's the disconnect in how men and women see the world that you're outlining here?
I'm probably a little effeminate, I'm certainly no angler, but I'm reading that and your summary of the male position strikes me as almost unbelievably stupid. Fishing as an athletic activity? Are these men really that dumb? I wouldn't fuck him either, frankly.
The female perspective is persnickety and bratty and bitchy, but probably accurate to a reasonable approximation.
I agree with you on balance that some women genuinely disliking fish pictures started the ball rolling, but the far greater effect that makes fish pictures a meme and accentuates their unattractiveness is the knowledge that they are unattractive socially. Once that becomes common knowledge, it is fatal.
out of curiousity, have you ever gone fishing in your life?
edit: to be less snarky. I wasn't trying to do a steelman that makes either side look good. I was just trying to summarize the thinking that I've seen on both sides. Some of which is admittedly quite stupid.
Probably a dozen or so times. Though fairly casually beyond one big sailing trip from Islamorada to Key West and back, when we fished intermittently but constantly for two weeks.
I will say I've never been fly fishing, which I understand is a very different animal.
Like I said I'm no angler. But I see very little visible correlation between fishing performance and athleticism in my friends.
OK fair enough. I wasn't trying to imply that it's some sort of hardcore athletic championship. Just that it's... something! It involves using your body in the real world, using muscles and physical skill. It's "touching grass" as the kids these days say. It's something non-digital. Plus all the other stuff I said about it being happy, natural, expensive, etc.
If women only want guys who have won a major athletics tournament than we are truly doomed as a species.
To be fair, as I think of it more, I think you have the right of it. If you graphed generalized Five Domain fitness against fishing trips-per-year, age adjusted I would bet that fishing would have a positive correlation with fitness up to median, but a weak correlation above median. I was committing the sin of failing to consider the vast number of people too sedentary to fish.
The point I'm getting at is always less about the real implication than the social implication. These are social games.
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This is the first I've heard of Fishing Picture discourse, but I will say that a (not very strenuous) hiking picture seems like it would be much better. Hiking suggests trees, mountains, nature, touching grass, and is way more girlfriend friendly. You can go on a little hiking picnic together! She will definitely not be expected to help gutting fish. She will not be asked to have an opinion on the size of their fish. There's no thought of "I wish I had rubber boots and overalls for this activity, but not enough to actually buy them, so I guess my shoes will just smell like fish now." Just overall better. If the guy isn't going to invite her fishing, then it's just as bad -- he can be expected to spend a lot of weekends with his fishing buddies instead of with her.
FWIW, I have been fishing. The one time I caught some fish was a salmon run. Then someone had to teach me how to clean the fish, I froze it, and had to keep coming up with meals that could use poorly filleted salmon for several months until I had eaten said fish. It was... fine. It was almost free salmon. But there was really no opportunity at all for it to be romantic.
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Don't give up so easily, we just have to come up with approximately 4 billion athletic competitions, and split the prizes.
Once I set a challenge at my gym for everyone to build a "personal pentathlon." That is, pick 5 exercises/events that you think the lowest percentage of people could beat you at all 5. No matter how unusual the exercises or strange the combination, what can you do that no one else could do better all at once?
I'm no hero when it comes down to it, but I don't think 1% of the population could beat me at all five of: Moonboard climbing max V3-4 climbs in 30 minutes, 5min kettlebell snatch test @28kg, max muscle ups in 10 minutes, 1rm power clean and push jerk, 2k row for time. I'm not even good by hobbyist standards at some of those choices, but I'm good enough to pip most people. The guys who can out climb better than me rarely jerk more, the guys who jerk more rarely climb.
So that's one method.
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So there's a button you can press that makes every woman who doesn't get it not respond? Good; from the looks of most relationships I see, it's hard to filter them out and they seem absolutely awful to live with (on both sides of the equation; I observe that "people who get it" and "people who don't" might as well be different sexual orientations). I guess that's why "good thing you're pretty" is how straight men work; the species would probably have died out otherwise.
I guess the meta then is simply to have a profile picture that's making fun of fish pictures so you can select for women who are secure enough not to [have to] take themselves too seriously (for various reasons), but I think that's also untenable for most men either because they're not with it enough to come up with something silly, or because women of that type have some pretty unique quirks (and they're all flat for some reason, which doesn't tend to trigger the 'attractive' flag in most men, which rather humorously creates the same problem from the opposite end).
Like @Sloot said, it's very easy to get women to not respond. The hard part is getting anyone to respond at all. Try your "meta" and see how it works!
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Maybe not every woman, but in general for most men there’s a button to have most women not respond: The “send message” button, even after a match when/where applicable.
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I like this comment because it illustrates how even in the ostensibly "what you see is what you get" limited space of online dating, there is still a lot of room for subtlety and covert signalling. Is a fish a fish, or an aquatic MAGA symbol? Is the guy who writes "moderate" actually quickly flashing up his gang sign while being able to say, "I was just scratching my head."
It seems that was' old is new; women want a straightforward but respectful guy who is going to be upfront with them. Men will contort the truth and introduce a lot of personal moral flexibility for a shot on goal (Stanley Cup Game 7 tonight).
The most important point is that social intelligence has been, is, and always will be a highly prized skill. So prized that it will always find a way to be showcased.
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Fishing is a red tribe hobby and it’s not a particularly high-status red tribe hobby; much of the US has water temperatures too warm for classic European gentlemen’s game fish. Everyone in the red tribe fishes, but actually eating bass is kind of a bumpkin peasant thing. Fishing for panfish(a category of fish that are so named for their culinary qualities) is inherently peasant-like, as much as I might like to do it(although tbh Cajuns are sometimes exempt from the usual status games).
Boats, lake houses, etc are pretty heavily high end red tribe hobbies and like hunting can be a form of red tribe status display as much as a recreation; I don’t think hotrodding or horses are that different, boats are just more common. For older red tribe men this is often easier to get past the wife than other high-cost hobbies because of the perception that boats are great for family oriented recreation.
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"Why do so many guys have fishing/hunting stuff in their Tinder profile pics" is a perennial complaint/debate in Finnish social medias, but I haven't seen it explicitly connected to politics, just "no woman is going to be impressed by this stuff, why don't guys put a bit of an effort in their profile pics instead of just using whatever is at hand?" and like. (After all, many guys don't take pics of themselves on the reg - pics taken to demonstrate a nice catch or something may indeed be the most recent ones of them available!) The common retort is that it's good if the profile pic shifts out the woman who can't appreciate a man's hobby.
And then, of course, there are the cowgirl tomboys who shoot better than the boys. I’ve unironically met rural women who 100% are looking for a guy to do outdoors recreation with them. Red tribe women like their red tribe men.
Maybe things are more gender-stratified in Finland, I don’t know.
Nah, there are women who hunt and fish, but one might guess that since it's still a male-coded hobby, women who participate will have an easier time finding a guy without needing Tinder than the ones who don't.
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You could use it as a sorting mechanism, but I doubt that is what most men are going for. The other pics I see commonly complained about on both sides in the driving selfie and the mirror selfie, or the top down selfie if the subject is fat.
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